Far from being diluted, the conflict around tourist accommodation in the Galician capital adds new chapters. “Times of great struggle are coming” predicted the president of Aviturga, Dulcinea Aguín, in a conversation with ABC following the opening of 21 new tourist apartments in the center of Santiago by a German multinational, which is studying five other options to expand throughout the city. For the owners of this type of business, who have been threatened for years by the activity they carry out, “this is unprecedented”. “These governments which want to force neighbors to close their houses, which are a source of income for their national economy, at the same time, they allow the entry of foreign capital at their free will, buy historic buildings and devote them entirely to tourist apartments”, reflects the spokesperson for the owners of the VUT of Galicia.
The truth is that the management of STV has affected successive local governments for years, from the vain attempt to veto them from Compostela Aberta with Martiño Noriega at the helm, to the change in regulations to limit them to small pockets of the city, promoted by the socialist Xosé Sánchez Bugallo. The current mayor, Goretti Sanmartín, abstained from this vote and promised those affected a solution which was never found. Actually, The current government has stepped on the accelerator to ban tourist apartments from the market, impose fines of up to 10,000 euros. Meanwhile, landlord platforms advocate case-by-case struggle and resistance. “It remains the judicial area and we advise owners to always meet the requirements,” explains Aguín.
A round table organized a few days ago in the capital, in which legal experts participated, revealed “the lack of legal rigor applied by the Santiago City Council in the process of banning VUT”. At the meeting, professionals from the legal sector presented their vision on the controversial issue – the case of USC administrative law professor Luis Míguez – who analyzed the role of the Compostela City Hall in the veto of tourist apartments . In the opinion of Aviturga spokespersons, the absence of an ordinance that regulates pre-existing uses of VUTs (those registered in the Xunta registry before the ban by the Bugallo government) responds to “a political strategy of Sanmartín to avoid the demonization of this economic model without its ban having any political cost. »
This is why, insist those concerned, Raxoi bases its decisions concerning the management of this type of housing – a thousand in the city – on legal relationships “while in reality it is a political decision”. Regarding the path that owners harmed by the ban on tourist apartments in much of the city should take, the panel’s experts highlighted the legal “inconsistency” of the mayor’s arguments, and They issued clear advice to maintain “the judicial pulse” of the Council. “The ideal is that they keep their processes open and meet all requirements,” insists Aviturga.
22,000 VUTs in Galicia
The same week in which we learned that Galicia has nearly 22,000 tourist accommodations, offering nearly 116,000 accommodation places, those affected by the measures of the Compostela City Hall maintain that the forced closure has no effect in the city’s rental market. The same data is provided by the Federation of Real Estate Companies of Galicia, which denies a beneficial effect on the rental market, which Raxoi however insists on. Concerning the daily life of these accommodations, Aviturga specifies that all the people concerned still do not have a closure order and have not been released from the REAT. exercise while continuing to defend their rights through legal channels, “And they will do it until they have a definitive closure order,” they threaten. Currently, Santiago has around 225 rental homes, the same as before the VUT veto, but more expensive.
